Month: May 2010

Over this past weekend, I finally transplanted all the seedlings that I grew. Unfortunately I ran into a bit of an issue, since almost all the seedlings developed a bad case of sunburn on their leaves. Guess I shouldn’t have given the seedlings full sun right off the bat, since I put them out for the full day on Friday the 14th.

Last year my issue was “damping off” (see here & here), and now this year sunburns. Man if it isn’t one thing its another.

Amazing what another three days can do, since the Spicy Greens Mix and the Bordeaux really added some height. While the Outredgeous in the front seems a little bit slow to the party, but I think its only because the Outredgeous is more of a head style of romaine lettuce.

You can really start to see all the different greens starting to fill in that first section of the salad table. Another couple of weeks and I should be ready for my first harvest of greens. I’ve also got all the transplants chilling out in the salad table, waiting to be planted in the ground.

It’s been eight days since I sowed all the seeds for this frame, and for the previous four days its been raining heavily, and I think all that rain was what the salad table needed since I’m just starting to see some germination activity, more so from the Spicy Greens Mix and the Bordeaux, than from the Outredgeous. I guess we’ll see what happens in a couple more days.

Look at that sweet corn grow! And check out all the rest of the random stuff that I’ve gotten from my farmer neighbor (leeks, fingerling seed potatoes), as well as from the local nursery (white and red onion sets, sage, basil, cilantro, rosemary.)

You can also see in photo #5 the free seeds (see here) that I got from my neighbor starting to germinate.

Here are a bunch of pics of the discarded seedlings in the white cups. I also started a whole flats worth of sweet corn just to test to out, and so far they seem to be doing very well. The sweet corn ended up germinating a lot quicker than I thought it would (about 3 days to sprout.)

This was one of those projects that should have been completed at least a couple of weeks back. But each free weekend that I had in March & April, would somehow get booked.

So a little bit of back story on this project. Around mid-March I ended up being part of a syndicate that was going to purchase a whole pig from The Slagel Family Farm down in central Illinois. Well something went sideways in the order, and instead of a whole pig (~200lbs, dressed) being delivered to Mado they delivered half a pig (~100lbs, dressed) instead. It was kind of a bummer to get half a pig, since we were splitting this pig four ways. But in the end, half a pig worked out better, since we were struggling just to refrigerate half a pig. So I don’t even know where we would have stored another 100lbs of pork meat and bones. Continue reading →

A couple of you might know this, but the guy that lives next door to me, works on a CSA farm on the outskirts of town. Any questions that I have about agriculture/farming, I always shoot his way. Well now that the growing season is well under way, he let me know that he had a bunch of very old seeds from Johnny’s that they couldn’t use on the farm, since they were too old (expiration date of 2005.) So he let me know that if I wanted some, that I was more then welcome to poach however much I needed.

Since the packets that he had were 1/4 to 1/2lb in size and being how old the seeds were, I only ended up taking about a 100 seeds of the two different seeds that he had. I guess we shall see in the next week or so, if anything germinates out of these seeds. Since they both looked like two very interesting seed varieties for squashes.

I was bored one evening a few months back, so with a pile of bagels in the fridge, I thought that I would make a quick bagel breakfast sandwich for dinner. I really didn’t have a recipe in mind per se, but I did kind of roughly base this sandwich on something that you might get at a Big Apple Bagel’s restaurant. Here is how the sandwich stacks up ingredients wise: